LeRoy Neiman—Artist, Provocateur—Tells All

by Mary L. TaborMary L. Tabor is the author of the novel Who by Fire, the connected short story collection The Woman Who Never Cooked, which won Mid-List Press’s First Series Award and was published when she was 60. Her short stories have won numerous literary awards. Her memoir (Re)Making Love is a modern real-life love story that has been profiled in Real Simple magazine. She interviews other artists via Rare Bird Blog Talk Radio in her Goodreads Book Club and where she and other authors exchange and discuss books with the members. A born and bred liberal, she wrote an occasional column on the arts, love and creativity for The Communities at The Washington Times and now here for Facts and Arts. Her experience spans the worlds of journalism, business, education, fiction and memoir writing, landing her in both Marquis Who’s Who in America and Marquis Who’s Who of American Women and she is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow. She taught creative writing for more than a decade at George Washington University, was a visiting writer and professor at Universityof Missouri-Columbia in their graduate creative writing program. The Smithsonian’s Campus-on-the-Mall, where she taught for many years, has called her “One of our most prized lecturers on the subjects of “Getting Started as a Writer” and “Starting Late.” She has appeared on the XM Satellite radiobook-talk show “This Is Audible” to discuss James Joyce’s Ulysses and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.25.09.2014

LeRoy Neiman’s paintings, posters and famed handlebar mustache made him one of the most recognizable artists of our time.

He tells all in All Told: My Art and Life Among Athletes, Playboys, Bunnies and Provocateurs,his autobiography that I previewed before its release on his 91st birthday. At that time, he gave me what turned out to be his last interview. Neiman died 12 days later.

His book gives us the powerful story of the creative journey through rejection, along with his scoop on the famed and storied folk he met, cavorted with, and, yes, painted.

We journey with him from scrappy kid in Saint Paul, Minnesota, through his decision before he finished high school to join the Army during the second great war, to his celebrated career as the “Playboy artist in residence,” as he calls himself; then to see his work regularly featured on TV’s Wide World of Sports,to benamed Official Artist of the Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid and in Sarajevo and the Summer Olympics, Los Angeles, and to become the man who met and painted Muhammad Ali and virtually every sport and movie legend of his time.

To ring in a Frank Sinatra favorite—yes, he painted him too—he did it his way.

The story that Neiman reveals and that makes this autobiography worth reading, not only for the incredible images, is the struggle that underlies his extraordinary success with sales of his prints that at the time of my interview in 2012 still brought in $10 million a year.

Rejection was the name of the game that most of us would argue he won.

He did not meet with critical approval. In 1957 he gets invited to the Corcoran in DC, is on display at Chicago’s Art Institute and on to the Big Apple with the likes of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

But the so-called critics in New York snubbed him while his fame grew. In spite of them, he sold paintings faster than he could paint them. And he was off to the races, literally and figuratively: His paintings of jockeys and thoroughbreds are now the stuff of urban legends.

Perhaps more deeply revealing is the critical—in all senses of that word—bond with his beloved mother. He tells us, “My mother never praised or encouraged me.” Once, she even threw out his paintings. She opens and closes the book like a thread that both held him and challenged him.

But let the critics be damned. He resolutely refused to “defer” to those he dubbed “the art elites.”

LeRoy Neiman knew what he was about.

“Imagination,” he tells us, “comes of not having things,” key words for the creative soul. “Paintings were windows,” he says. He studied his peers. The power of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning seemed to him “like witnessing a powerful switch from one way of seeing the world to another,” words key to the invention that marks his work.

Those lessons inform the fullness, the speed of the images that flash off his canvases.

Insert “artist” for writer in these words by Henry James and you have LeRoy Neiman: A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost.

Consider these facts culled from his curriculum vitae:

He goes AWOL briefly from the Army but comes home with an honorable discharge and five battle stars. Neiman notes, “The most significant designation on those discharge papers of November 20, 1945 was Army T/4 Artist.”

He learns his craft at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where he also taught, as well as at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois.

He loved boxing and boxing loved him. To wit: Induction into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame the International Boxing Hall of Fame, the Boxing Writers Association, England’s Lonsdale Boxing Club and recipient of the Marvin Kohn Good Guy Award. The list goes on: Friar’s Club Tribute, Ellis Island Medal of Honor, Honorary Doctor of Arts at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Arts Horizon’s Paul Newman Award for Services to the Arts and Children.

His love of fine art in music, literature and painting melds seamlessly with the seemingly paradoxical underbelly of his story: The low and high life he led in pool halls and bars and his self-acknowledged lifelong “affection for the hucksters.”

This candid autobiography reveals the author’s private collection: A photo of Muhammad Ali, in robe and neck towel, pen-in-hand, drawing with Neiman at his side. An evocative sepia and brown ink on paper that Neiman did of Leonard Bernstein, drawn in his presence. Neiman may not have been welcome in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but the doors to the rehearsal halls at the Metropolitan Opera and Avery Fisher Hall were open to him.

We who admire his work and his story know that “the doppelgänger, the white bearded Monet” who lies hidden in his paintings lives in Neiman’s heart and lies at the heart of this telling.

Neiman reveals how to overcome, how to live on the margin of the fine-art world, at the center of the high life, the low life and all the in-between and never forget who you are.

Here is LeRoy Neiman in answer to my questions about his life, his love—married 55 years to Janet Byrne—and his art.

Q:You candidly describe being seen by the critics as “the urchin clambering over the gates of their exclusive world.” Who is a painter the so-called critics have not recognized?

Neiman:What a challenging question for me. One of my young artist friends, James de la Vega, has had some recognition in New York City but currently considers himself more of a philosopher/artist. At both Columbia University in New York City and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I have a presence in the art departments. In both these schools there are many talented young people training and experimenting in areas that are brand new. I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist. I also tell them it is essential to draw or paint every day as I have done for decades now. As I turn 91 this June 8th, I have to admit my hours at the easel have diminished.

Q:Through your mother’s piercing insight, you realized “photographs are realistic but static” and so you’ve met virtually everyone you painted. Who gave you insights into the soul that you incorporated in the painting?

Neiman:Perhaps Muhammad Ali who I drew and painted for so many years in many different settings. I really followed his entire career from the workouts to dressing room to the square ring in the big arenas. He was always a compelling subject. There is also a watercolor I did in 1969 that reveals Joe Namath at that moment as he is walking off the football field. His posture says everything about him at that moment.

Q:We have here one fashion illustration of your wife Janet. Have you painted Janet or is she hidden in paintings like your Monet figure?

Neiman:My lovely wife Janet has been in a few paintings. She is basically a reserved woman who has never sought the limelight. She has always been there throughout my career and continues to be at my side.

LeRoy Neiman died on June 20, 2012, shortly after our exchange.

On this life lived well, I close with the poet Marianne Moore, who says in her poem “What Are Years?”:

His mighty singing ... how pure a thing is joy.

This is mortality, this is eternity.

All Told: My Art and Life Among Athletes, Playboys, Bunnies, and Provocateursby LeRoy Neiman (Lyons Press, $29.95; June 8, 2012)

This essay is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Below links to Amazon for LeRoy Neiman's All Told, and for Mary L. Tabor's Who by Fire and for her (Re)Making Love.

Rate this essay

Click the stars to rate

Comments (7)

A panoramic view of a genius

by Colm Herron

Your essay left me mentally quite breathless Mary. In a short space you gave a panoramic view of a genius who did all that he did because he could. A man with a subject in every port, an artist who never stopped moving and whose paintings seem to move before our eyes. Where, for example, I associate Edward Hopper with stillness, with people caught between acts, I see LeRoy Neiman as someone who painted almost continuous motion. His range, his audacity, his humility and his determination to keep on doing are all a model for creators everywhere: composers, musicians, writers, performers.

The art world pays lip service to the "anything goes" school but choose their heroes with all the perspicacity of those who cheered the emperor in his carriage. In Britain we have our Damien Hirsts and Tracey Emins who are as naked as their day is filled with sycophants. In the US you would have more than your share of the same old lies and liars. When you wrote of "the low and high life he led in pool halls and bars and his self-acknowledged lifelong affection for the hucksters” I thought of Steinbeck and Cannery Row (among other places!) who was derided as not being a true artist and insulted by the Nobel panel even as they awarded him the prize for literature. The cheek!

And when you put this question to LeRoy Neiman: 'You candidly describe being seen by the critics as "the urchin clambering over the gates of their exclusive world.” Who is a painter the so-called critics have not recognized?' he gave a reply that was both restrained and magnanimous. In spite of all the critics' slings and arrows he didn't even bother to flash his antlers at them. Didn't have to.

To Colm Herron

by Mary L. Tabor

Your comment serves as an eloquent after note to my essay and interview from a fine artist in your own right, one who works in the trenches and never gives up. I hope that LeRoy Neiman's fans--and they are legion--read your comment.

A meaningful introduction

by Jason Howell

I really love the way this piece was put together. Mary knows her subject and knows how to write and assemble around and toward her subject in a way that radiates for the reader.

I know next to nothing about art in any scholarly sense, but as someone who spends time with language the corollaries couldn't be louder. "Paintings are windows." I read you Mr. Neiman.

To Jason Howell

by Mary L. Tabor

Dear Jason,

As a writer, who I think it's fair to say labors in the trenches, I wrote this piece and thought of LeRoy as someone whose talent won out despite some considerable odds. Of course the friendship with Hugh Hefner was a help, but still we know, don't we, how good work can easily be overlooked?

Read this: “ ‘Who will read me, who will care?’ It does not help the work to be done, that work already completed is surrounded by silence and indifference—if it is published at all. Few books ever have the attention of a review—good or bad. Fewer stay longer than a few weeks on bookstore shelves, if they get there at all. … ‘Works of art’ (or at least books, stories, poems, meriting life) ‘disappear before our very eyes because of the absence of responsible attention,’ Chekhov wrote nearly ninety years ago."

Tillie Olsen in her book _Silences_ wrote this in 1965.

Thanks for reading and commenting, Jason.

Mary

Super-journalism

by Voltaire

Mme. Tabor:

At first I thought you were slipping into the role of mere journalist (writing down what the man says) but with each paragraph you dug deeper into Nieman's persona, finally summing him up with that brilliant Marianne Moore line. Your prose-portrait equals Nieman's oil portraits.

To Voltaire

by Mary L. Tabor

Dear Voltaire,

I am deeply honored by your generous comment. Thank you, sir.

Couldn't agree more...

by Jason Howell

That's what makes your effort here a work of art in itself, I'd say. A tribute for sure, but also more.

Comments Policy

Comments that contribute civilly and constructively to the discussion
of the topic, from any point of view, are welcome; comments that are
not civil or constructive are not.

Facts & Arts is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program
designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.